On a more general note, I started a second play through last night. Because I hate the cinematic portions of the game*, this time I just sped through the start and abandoned the main quest after the first meeting with Viktor. And I'm having a great time, just puttering around the starting zone at low level, and on Very Hard difficulty, doing Gigs and NCPD missions, while Jackie sends impotent text messages urging me to restart the movie.
What struck me about this experience is how easy it would have been for CDPR to improve the game's pacing. The content is basically already there; all you'd have to do is replace the prologue's 6-month montage with a few extra lines of dialogue, make up a song and dance about how Jackie and V are working closely with Regina (the Watson Fixer contact); string together 5 or 6 of Regina's gigs into a "mandatory" questline culminating with Dexter taking an interest in the new up-and-comers from Watson--and just like that, the rest of the story would gain crucial context. The gameplay would too, TBH; the player would have more basis to feel that he earned the skills to do major-setpiece gigs like the Maelstrom Food Plant and The Heist. You wouldn't even need to pay Keanu for this sequence!
* - I don't actually
hate the story stuff; it's well done for what it is--much better than most other AAA developers' attempts at cinematic storytelling, and boy oh boy do they all attempt it these days. CDPR's strength is slick narrative presentation; Witcher 3 blew people's minds back in 2015 not because it had especially good game mechanics, and certainly not because it had gobs of genuine C&C; Witcher 3 blew people's minds because it was the first major open-world game with high-quality narrative content all over the map. It managed to combine Todd Howard's, "See that mountain, climb that mountain," with the tantalizing possibility that something unique and interesting might actually be on the mountain. It was a triumph of presentation. But it didn't age especially well. I'm certainly in no rush to re-experience dozens of hours Quen-spamming dodge rolls interspersed with voice actors exclaiming variations of "Where's Ciri?"
Unfortunately almost every AAA developer has been trying to imitate Witcher 3 ever since. Doubly unfortunate is that Cyberpunk is actually a decent
game, underneath all the railroaded glorified-cutscene shit, which just gets in the way of the player's enjoyment once he has some idea of what's going on in the plot. The cutscenes can feel patronizing and confining even on the first play through, much less the second. I wish CDPR would embrace game play more enthusiastically. They're clearly capable; the skeleton of a great open-world immersive sim is here, but too often you can almost sense that the designers pulled back, retreating to lazy "cinematic" resolutions to problems that the player ought to have a role in solving.
Gargaune had
a great post on this earlier in the thread.
